Everything Carl Sagan Forgot To Tell You About Space
by dreamsteampunk
Summary: Kamala's first kiss happens in a spaceship in Quadrant II of the Circinus Galaxy, getting cheered on by space vigilantes and reformed pirates. This is the story of how she got there.
1. prologue

"_Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."_

_\- Carl Sagan_

* * *

Their story starts like all stories do - with their mothers.

* * *

Diya Mukherjee came to America with nothing but: a suitcase full of Western clothes bought over the course of the year it took her to make her decision, an NYU acceptance letter stuffed in her pocket along with six US dollars in change, and a legacy of immigration behind her. She was 18, an adult in her new home, and utterly alone. Her parents, cousins, friends, the shopkeeper who gave out drinks of coke with straws pre-stuck in them and asked for the glass bottles back, high school classmates and the kids she played with her whole life, they were all behind her in Karachi.

She clutched her bangle as she stepped off the plane, recalling a grandmother who could walk over a newly formed border away from the only home she knew, who made her way through riots and fear, who stepped past the heads of her brothers and father which had been dashed against the steps of their own home, who made her way into a newly minted country in the largest, most desperate march humanity had ever seen. Diya's fingers found the groove in the bangle that hid secret compartments, the same compartments that let her mother smuggle her husband's research with her as the death squads came in, pregnant with Diya and hiding, running from a tragedy enacted upon hundreds that the world looked upon and did nothing about.

Diya walked alone, and could not decide if that was for the better. Her grandmother was Indian. Her mother, Pakistani. She, Bangladeshi. Her daughter, like the mothers before her, raised in an unfamiliar country professing to be her home, would be American.

* * *

Diya's roommate is a young white girl from Ohio - further west than Diya has ever been. Diya keeps to herself, but Chelsea grows on her, bit by bit. She drags Diya to a farmer's market, ineffably cheerful at 5 in the morning, 20 miles out of the way. It is these moments that Diya most misses home - misses the calls of _jalebiwalas_ and men on cycles, dragging flatbeds of the morning's harvest of fruit through the Dhaka traffic - and most grows to wonder at the new place she might call home.

Chelsea wants to study politics, and she speaks with a strange unfamiliarity about the events of Diya's childhood. She is confused about Diya's taught distrust of the West and the white men who live in it, and is especially confused about Diya's paradoxical love for America. It doesn't make any sense to Chelsea, who was born in the era of Vietnam and free love, who started her life questioning the sagacity of the country she was born in. Diya, on the other hand, was born in the throes of the Bangladeshi Liberation War and genocide, and the year she migrated to America, the Sikh insurgency had massacred dozens and the Indian citizens rioted back, all while the the LTTE fought for Sri Lankan independence. Across the world, America stood, untouched by violence. Across the world, America was peaceful. After a lifetime of watching war, peace was all Diya could ever ask for. Chelsea does not talk about these things with the lifetime of familiarity Diya has, but once she learns the names and places, she has an insight Diya wishes she could replicate. She has the insight born of living there her whole life, the kind that can spot the red flags and tell Diya that this American peace is tenuous. Diya disagrees, and as is their eternal conversation scripted to end, Chelsea agrees to disagree.

Eventually, Chelsea drags Diya to a party, brushing aside the weak protests of a test on circuitry. It was there Diya met Paromita Bahadir, the name a jolt of familiarity in the alien land of America. It certainly seemed the same to Paromita. She was two years Diya's senior, a Bengali who married a Turkish man and, in quiet defiance to America, wore not the American wedding rings but the coral and white bangles of a married Bengali. Diya touches her own bangle when she hears that; she wonders about the symbols they all choose to adorn themselves with (Chelsea's nostalgic peace sign pin, the Star of David their physics professor wears around her neck, the little rainbow coloured heart posted outside the GSA), the mask they build out of their objects, the truth they convey with their labels.

* * *

She chose engineering because it was just a four year degree with a guaranteed job, and it wasn't like she disliked math. The first time a professor snarked about her getting her "M.R.S. degree", she blinked in unfamiliar bewilderment. By the fifth time, Diya began to get a sixth sense about these things. She is, against her will, hardened to these kinds of things. She doesn't date, not at all, her underclassman years. She is not here for an M.R.S. degree, just a bachelors in electrical engineering. Then, she meets Yusuf Khan.

He's a business major, a Pakistani, and a boy. Those are three red flags, and Diya ignores each one of them.

* * *

She couldn't tell you when "Call me Muneeba," turned into "_Amar dak nam_ Diya." She couldn't tell you the day she had her first kiss, the day they bought their first house in New Jersey, or the first time they said "I love you." She doesn't know any marker in their relationship by date - except two.

Aamir, her son, is born February 17, 1995.

Her daughter, Kamala Khan, is born on September 2, 2001.

She feels incredibly sad, somehow, that her children will have no _daknam_. But Yusuf never brought it up, and she never had the confidence to discuss it. It feels like it is not a big deal - hundreds of millions of Americans have no _daknam_ \- but still, Diya mourns the name they should have had.

* * *

They are bringing Kamala in for a mandatory check-up. The hospital waiting room smells like nothing in the most peculiarly artificial manner, which makes Diya clutch her newborn child all that much harder. How she loves being able to say that - her newborn child. A person she made, all on her own (with a little help from Yusuf). A child she carried to term, she lived with for nine months, and was about to raise into a world that would be just a little bit better than the one she lived in.

She thinks all these things when the nurse comes out, shaking his head.

"What a sad day," he says, and Diya's heart freezes for a second. _Is something wrong with the baby?_

"What?" asks Yusuf, always the quicker of the two to recover.

"With the bombing and all," says the nurse, incredibly unhelpfully. "Right this way, Mrs. Khan."

"Muneeba, please" she corrects, with absolutely no pleading in her tone. All these years, and she still hates the sound of M.R.S.

It is about an hour later when Yusuf comes into her checkup room, with its clean white corners and crinkly papered bench. He is tight-lipped and clutching a headline that reads "WE ARE ALL AMERICAN."

It is that day that the war Diya spent her life watching first makes its way to America's shores.

* * *

The next month, aliens from the moon beamed down to Earth and offered technological advancement beyond humanity's wildest dreams.

The Kree are almost certainly untrustworthy, and very definitely have an agenda. They are nationalistic, dictatorial, and their rhetoric, even when filtered through their own translators, reminds Diya of the words of the white men who slowly bled her country dry in the name of "advancement" and "industrialisation". It is a dozen red flags, and humanity ignores every single one of them.

It takes the UN three weeks to decide. It takes them another two days to unveil the Earth-Hala Alliance, and its newest terms. Diya doesn't read through them.

She's watched these wars her whole life, and she knows how they end.

* * *

_Prologue notes: It's a common Bangali thing to do to give their children two names, a bhalo nam and a dak nam, and since Kamala's mother is listed with two names, I headcanon that she's East Bengali (used to be part of Pakistan until independence movement/Bangladeshi genocide) and her dad is Pakistani. It's probably just a continuity error but i'm Bangali myself and My Canon Now. plus i think the idea of a dak nam (its the name only your closest family and friends call you) is super interesting in the context of superhero identities._


	2. attraction and repulsion

Chapter 1: 2008-2012

* * *

_"I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of diamond. There are atomic nuclei a few miles across which rotate thirty times a second. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it."_

\- Carl Sagan

* * *

Kamala was sitting on an unfamiliar couch in an unknown person's house, trying desperately to seem less inattentive. It wasn't her fault that adults were so boring! She didn't understand why her parents insisted on dragging her here to a random person's house on a Sunday evening. She wasn't even sure what excuse was given for this gathering this time. Plus, in her infinite seven-year-old wisdom, she was certain that it didn't even matter to the adults - it was just an excuse to eat each other's food, talk loudly, and dump their kids in a room hoping they'd get along.

Well, Kamala certainly was _not_. Her plate was heaped with rice and daal and chicken bits that she periodically picked at, in no hurry now that they had irreversibly gotten cold. The couch was a little uncomfortable, plasticy and cool on the Kamala's exposed under-knees peeking out from the skirt her _amma_ made her wear in order to make a good impression on their hosts. She wasn't sure why her mom bothered. If they were friends, surely they didn't care what state each other was in? She didn't care when Bruno smelled a little funny and was wearing the same dumb shirt every day. Maybe it was just something adults learned to like, like fancy cheeses and beer. (She was only guessing about the beer thing. Nobody she knew drank things like _alcohol_ but she knew from the H-Screen that white Americans certainly did, and never shut up about it.)

She sighed again and winced a little as a particularly loud and sharp burst of laughter came from the table everyone has gathered around. Nobody was sitting, of course. The adults she knew never _sat at the table_ at parties. There wasn't enough space to accommodate the frankly impressive amount of people jammed into the single house, and every spare square inch of what was every other day a dinner table was covered in ceramic pots full of dishes. She couldn't even call it a buffet style spread - it was just chaotic. One man, with a handlebar mustache that drooped so firmly over his lips Kamala was surprised to see no food bits stuck in it, reached over two different arms and three different precariously tipping dishes of steaming food to snag another fish cutlet on the opposite end of the table, dropping it back down on his paper plate.

It was such a shock to her when she found out what everyone else's conception of a dinner party was.

There certainly was no subdued chatter, punctuated by clinks of metalware on china plates. The noise in the house was almost like a physical entity in itself, doing its best to smother Kamala with a pillow. The constant fight of conversations to be heard over each other was broken in irregular patterns only by the kind of donkey-bray laughter that inspired the single darkest emotion in Kamala that any seven year old had ever felt. She briefly felt the urge to commit genocide but only on people with ugly laughs. Then, the laughter stopped and Kamala dismissed those thoughts as dumb and hyperbolic.

She looked a little forlornly at where Aamir was, chatting with his fellow pre-pubescent and, at the time, much cooler friends. It would be weird if Kamala went to join them. They were all almost twice her age, and intimidating besides. They also wanted nothing to do with her. Kamala went back to bemoaning the entire Pakistani community in New Jersey for having tons of kids Aamir's age and exactly none for her. How did her parents manage to pick the one year to have her that nobody else did?

Then, very abruptly, Kamala could instantly pick out a single word in the tidal wave of conversation - her name. She looked up at it, casting around until she saw her mom talking to another lady, who had a kid trailing after her, boredly fidgeting at her elbow. Kamala blinked and then quickly averted her eyes when the kid looked in her direction, pretending to be very intently studying the pattern of the curtains. She let her eyes trail up the weird paisley pattern for a few seconds before deeming it safe to look back. She regretted it instantly when she saw the tall lady her mom was talking to push the kid in her direction.

"Hi," said the kid, "I'm Nakia."

"Hi," said Kamala.

Nakia, unbothered by how recalcitrant Kamala was being, flopped down on the couch next to her. "I hate desi parties."

And with that, a bond was forged.

"Same," Kamala said, swinging her legs a little before stopping and frowning. She hated that she was so short her legs barely touched the ground. Kamala couldn't wait until she got her adult height and could do great things like get to the second shelf of the cupboards without having to climb onto the countertop.

The silence between that was broken when that same person with that donkey-bray laughter let their biological weapon of mass destruction loose on the party yet again, and Nakia groaned. "Ugh, I hate how loud they are. Let's go to my room."

Kamala was struck again with a brief and powerful surge of empathy for Nakia. She remembered when her parents hosted these kinds of parties in their own home and she was dragged out of the sanctuary of her own room and forced to make nice to randos invading her home.

Nakia walked off without looking back, and Kamala scrambled to follow. She followed the taller girl into a small room, mostly taken up by the bed and desk shoved off into a corner. Every inch of the desk was taken up by papers and notebooks and library books, stacked haphazardly at wonky angles. Her bed was neat though, all sheets tucked into corners and carefully placed pillows at the head. Nakia flung herself onto one end, motioning for Kamala to take a seat next to her. Kamala did so with a sudden hyper-awareness of her own limbs, mortally terrified of accidentally disturbing anything, leaving any proof that she had ever been inside the room of this girl she didn't know. She perched on the foot of the bed, hands on her knees, careful to keep her expression neutral as she glanced at all the posters on the walls. It didn't matter anyways; Nakia's face was firmly planted in her bedsheets so she wouldn't have been able to see Kamala casting about wildly for anything they could possibly have in common anyways.

The first thing on her desk was the Quran. The second book under that was a biography of Thomas Edison. The various lined papers under that indicated that it was possibly book report material - further evidence was the Tesla biography bookmarked with an eraser under all of those. The eraser bookmark reminded Kamala of the princess and the pea - it made such a bump in the pile that the whole stack seemed in danger of sliding off each other.

"Have you ever watched _Talking Animals Retell Parables To Kids_?" Kamala asked, suddenly reminded of it. The cartoon was the only reason she even knew what the princess and the pea was - she had to look it up after the episode.

"Sometimes, but my mom doesn't like it when I watch too much TV," Nakia responded.

"My favorite is the squirrel. Which one's yours?"

"I don't have a favorite." They sat in silence for another minute as Kamala contemplated that dead end in conversation. Finally, it seemed like Nakia took pity on her and rolled over to face Kamala fully.

"Do you watch _Mythbusters_?"

Kamala's face lit up. "Yes! I love it! I liked the episode where they shot Roxxon cars into space just to see if they imploded! It was so cool!"

Nakia quickly drew her into a debate over whether it was more fun to watch the cars get smashed or explode. Kamala picked explode, of course. They barely noticed when the party slowly trickled down, alone in their little oasis of a bed, furiously arguing their little seven year old hearts out.

* * *

Just like that, now that they had been introduced, Kamala began to see Nakia everywhere. She was in the cafeteria eating lunch on a metal bench, she was sitting on the tanbark in front of the slides as Kamala dangled from the monkey bars, she was walking home on the same route that Kamala took. Her nose was frequently two inches from a page, a fact that Kamala blamed for her initial ignorance of Nakia's existence. It was this same fact that obscured the fact that every time Kamala glanced over at her, she was alone. Nakia managed to radiate such an intense aura of contentment with her isolation that it took Kamala a few weeks to muster up the courage to take a detour from her normal seat across from Bruno. She wedged herself right next to Nakia, dropping her precariously loaded carton of school food right next to her barely picked at meal.

Nakia's head jerked up from the book; the thumbnail she had been absently chewing on fell out of her mouth in shock.

"Hi," Kamala said, as brightly as she could. "I went to your house once!"

"Yeah," Nakia responded, as suspiciously as she could. After a stare down worthy of a Western, lasting merely a few seconds, her attention dropped back to her book. This suited Kamala just fine. She turned her own attention to the plastic film standing in the way between her and the questionable mac and cheese she consumed once a week - on Wednesdays her mom worked late so she couldn't cook anything in advance for Thursday lunch. Bruno was late today, but that was nothing new. Mrs. Martinez always let her class out late, and that meant Bruno would have to add himself on to the end of the line that even now snaked out of the cafeteria doors.

True to form, it was another five minutes until Kamala noticed Bruno's shaggy dog hair meandering past the metal frame of the cafeteria doors, and it was another five minutes of sitting in silence until Bruno's own cafeteria lunch was handed to him over the sneeze guard. Kamala waved her hand as high as she could to get his attention and inform him that she had moved two tables over. Quizzical but acquising, Bruno dutifully slid in across from the two girls.

"This is Nakia. Our moms know each other," Kamala introduced. Bruno didn't even get the time to nod at her before she rapidly drew him into a discussion over the new _Adolescent Altered Samurai Tortoises_ episode.

Nakia huffed quietly but made no other motion to reassert her space. If she didn't turn a page of the book she resolutely kept up in front of her face, neither Kamala nor Bruno noticed.

* * *

The next three years pass in much the same way: Kamala, Nakia, and Bruno always sit together at lunch, regardless of which permutation of teachers they've all been assigned. The focus for Diya and Yusuf is Aamir, who went through high school with a worrying indifference towards almost every subject. He applied himself, of course, but didn't particularly enjoy any one particular subject. While he had a head for numbers, at one point in sophomore year he picks up a moral objection to finance that he never put back down, much to Yusuf's dismay.

Kamala is eleven and Aamir is eighteen. If Diya and Yusuf had been the kind of parents to take pictures of their children holding up mini chalkboards on their first days of school, this picture would have been one of their favorites - both their children are, for once, excited. Kamala, of course, couldn't wait to start school at an entirely new campus, one that was a whole four blocks shorter of a walk. Aamir was just excited with the promise of graduating in a year.

The first few weeks were abuzz with energy. Kamala chattered both her parents' ears off, a constant play-by-play of everything that happened each day. Diya smiled and nodded, resolving to look up unfamiliar terms later. Yusuf didn't even pretend to understand what was going on.

Aamir, by contrast, was far quieter, but Diya and Yusuf were content to let him do his own thing. The only part of the college admissions process left for him was the actual selection and essay writing and everything that entailed, which was also everything that Diya and Yusuf never did as international students. In light of their lack of experience and useful advice, they simply trusted that Aamir was in fact moving along at an average pace as he said he was. (He was not, but his SAT score was so good that he could write his name on a napkin for a college essay and Rutgers would accept him. At least, that was what he thought.)

* * *

Aamir turned eighteen with relatively little fanfare. There was a small party, mostly amongst his close friends, and a few days later he went online and registered in the selective service system. He also made a note in his calendar that he could vote in the 2014 midterms. That was the extent of the life-changing power of the 18th birthday, and frankly, Kamala was a little disappointed.

"Nothing _happened_," she complained to Nakia. "Harry Potter lied to us!"

"What did you expect? It's just a day, nothing magical actually happens," Nakia responded.

"You get to vote," Bruno chimed in. Kamala groaned.

"Yeah, but that's boring! Nothing fun happened."

"That," Nakia said with the air of a person with wisdom far beyond their age, "is reserved for your 21st birthday."

"Aamir's too Muslim to drink," Kamala said with a roll of her eyes. "He's too Muslim to work, even."

"That's not a bad way to be," Nakia said, a little self-consciously. She had just started wearing a hijab a few weeks ago, and was coming off a bad argument with her father over it.

(Text messages from two weeks ago, between Kamala Khan and Nakia Bahadir:

_Nakia: He said that I was only doing it because I was too American to know how else to be Muslim_

_Kamala: UGHHHH_

_that suck so much_

_I hate when ur parents pull the 'ur too American' card_

_Nakia: right? it's YOUR fault_)

"It's not, but it's also kinda dumb. What do you even get when you're legally an adult?"

"Kicked out," Bruno suggested. "But legally."

The rest of their lunch period was devoted to unravelling the mystery of what precisely was so great about the eighteenth birthday.

* * *

Two weeks later, Aamir disappeared.

* * *

The most frustrating thing about adults, Kamala thought, was that they never talked about anything. The more important a subject was, the less they were inclined to ever sit down and have a discussion about it.

In March, when the first college acceptance and rejection letters began filtering in, hidden amongst gas bills and newspapers, they were consigned to a little spot on the kitchen table, as if Aamir was just out late with his friends loitering near the CircleQ, and would come home in another hour and the whole family would gather around to watch him open it up and wait for him to see what the future would hold for him. As March ticked over into April and the letters gathered dust, the ritual of leaving each unopened envelope on the table began to take on a tinge of desperation and hopelessness. By May, the letters began to lose the shrine-like quality hope gave it.

Eventually, they were tucked away in the basement, hidden under other stacks of paper and bills and receipts and the bric-a-brac of life.


	3. magnitude and direction

Chapter 2

* * *

_"We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars."_

\- Carl Sagan

* * *

Kamala didn't know this, but the stations that housed spaceships capable of intersystemary travel didn't actually look all that different from the airplane terminal her mother stepped off of twenty-five years ago.

There is, no matter what, a certain universality to these intermediary spaces. Muffled PA systems, advanced thousands of years by alien technology, were now replaced by small, personalizable data screens hovering at Kamala's elbow. They flashed with constant updates, tracking arrivals and departures and air pressure and temperature and a thousand other data points all alike in only one respect - Kamala could not give less of a shit about them.

Earth Station Alpha was originally going to be known, back when it was first conceived of almost 18 years ago, as the International Space Station. It could have been considered a progression in the history of humanity - an uplifting epilogue to America and Russia's space race - had the discovery of the Kree not rendered it all flat. Now, it was no longer an International Space Station, a symbol of reconciliation and cooperation, but the ESA, a mark in galactic history as Earth's first spaceport, opening the planet for trade.

Kamala wasn't sure why she was thinking of that at the moment, when she should have been out of her mind in excitement at her first time in space, her first time off Earth. She looked across the utilitarian waiting area at an alien with three grey heads and thought: do you even know what you're standing on? The rest of the universe had discovered nuclear warfare centuries ago; did they even care that the Earth was nearly torn apart only thirty years before they showed up?

Next to her, Kamran shifted and took her hand. He had clammy hands, but Kamala felt that it would be rude to say something.

"I'm gonna get some coffee, do you want some?"

Kamala glanced at the data screen. "No, I'm good."

"Alright," Kamran said, getting up. "Keep an eye on our bags?"

"Yeah, sure," she said.

She watched him go for a bit, walking down chromium and glass hallways towards the shops outside their gate.

Next to her foot were two huge suitcases, containing a weeks worth of clothes each. Besides that, a toothbrush, and her mother's bangles, Kamala had ditched nearly everything else she owned in a backpack lying on her bed, along with a note. Well, everything except her phone. That, she dropped into a trashcan on the corner of Fifth and Morgenstern, because it felt a little more permanent somehow. Even now, there was a phantom itch in Kamala's right hand, an instinctive wish to click it on and see if anyone was trying to contact her. She tried not to think too hard about who would want to contact her, because it would lead inevitably into thinking about who she was about to leave behind.

Her parents, who just abruptly lost two children in four years. Bruno, who waved goodbye to her on Friday, casual and unsuspecting. Nakia, who she had gotten into a screaming fight with a week ago, and still hadn't totally made up. Kamala wished she could have waited another few weeks, that she could have parted with Nakia on good terms, but longhauls only ran past the ESA once a month, and Kamran had pointed out that if it wasn't a fight with Nakia, there would be something else. Some more unfinished business trying to tether her to Earth.

She leaned back in her seat and watched as a grey-skinned woman fiddled with some data pad and an outlet. She looked a bit like the komodo dragon on a National Geographic spread that Nakia had taped up in her bedroom throughout the middle school years when her dream occupation had been zoologist or xenobiologist. (No veterinary aspirations for Nakia: too ordinary.)

It was a little ironic. It had been Nakia's goal for every career she considered to eventually get off their little planet, get into the wider universe and take advantage of the opportunities there. And yet, here Kamala was, first of their friends to step outside the Earth's atmosphere.

She spotted Kamran walking back with two drinks in his hand, one clearly being an iced milk tea. He settled down in the seat next to her and offered her the cup as he took a long sip of his own warmer drink. After a few seconds, Kamala took the offered tea.

"I know you said no coffee, but I figured you were the type to like tea more," Kamran explained, casually resting his elbow on her armrest. When he sat and leaned down like that, especially while Kamala's back was straight, they were nearly the same height. Her eyes were just level with his earlobes; She noted absently that he swapped his preferred faux diamond studs for a matte black kind.

"Yeah," she said, sipping through the straw. "I like tea."

It was more bitter and less sugary than she usually had it, but it gave her something to do with her hands and a reason not to talk more, so she was okay with it.

Besides, she liked listening to Kamran speak. He had a nice accent - if she listened closer she could hear a little Texas in the vowels - and big ideas. Lots of plans.

"So," he said, tapping at his screen. "We're sharing a cabin, but I heard those are pretty spacious anyways."

Kamala tamped down on the ingrained bolt of fear that came with being alone with a man who wasn't family. It wasn't like Aamir would be here to supervise, and she had been alone with Bruno before. She wasn't sure why Kamran was any different - or rather, she didn't want to think about why Kamran would be any different.

Kamran kept going. "It's only about 5 weeks, plenty of time to learn our way around Ruul. The connection to their wireless network should be available after 20 days. We can start looking for a job to get set up, maybe find an apartment in a human-majority region."

"When does the ship start boarding?" Kamala asked.

"Actually, in about five minutes. Lucky I got back so fast, huh?"

"Yeah," said Kamala, worrying at her fingers. "Lucky."

Kamran had assured her a thousand times that he had enough money to at least make a down payment and keep them alive for the first month, but Kamala couldn't help her anxiety. They would be strangers on a planet with no other contacts, and without even much hope that this was where they would find any answers whatsoever.

* * *

The inside of their room on the ship was clean and artificially bright, with a resemblance to a very well-kept college dorm. Kamala and Kamran found their numbered apartment block fairly quickly, and settled in with a slight nervous energy. As Kamala was refolding her shirts to pack into the provided drawers, she thought about how scandalized her parents would be. There was a small divider between the rooms, but she was still about to spend five weeks in relative isolation with a man she was not related to. No chaperone, nothing.

Then she started thinking about why she had no chaperone and decided to table that train of thought entirely.

"Do we know who our neighbors are?" Kamala asked.

"What's that?" Kamran called from the bathroom. There was only one sink, but two sets of drawers, so they had agreed to each split a side. Thankfully, there were two beds separated by an adjustable folding screen.

"I said," Kamala raised her voice slightly, "do we know who our neighbors are?"

Kamran poked his head out of the doorway. "No, do you want me to go ask them?"

"It's fine," said Kamala, getting up off her knees. "I can go." She wanted an excuse to think about something else as well, as putting away clothing was much too unengaging to distract her from herself.

"Are you sure?" Kamran asked. His brows furrowed and he tilted his head. "People can be dangerous around here."

"Well, might as well find out now and not later, then."

"Alright," Kamran said, hesitantly turning his upper body back towards his unpacking. He kept his eyes on Kamala for a bit longer. "Be safe, though."

"I always am," she said. She could almost hear the rejoinder Kamran didn't say: then what are you doing on this trip with a boy you only met a year ago?

* * *

When Kamala pressed her hand against the door and it vanished entirely, reappearing only when she stepped outside, she assumed it had done something like scan her fingerprints and retract when it recognized her.

That wasn't true at all.

The doors were only doors in the sense that Kamala, a native human of earth, would call anything that separated openings into different rooms "doors". They were really something closer to very opaque forcefields keyed into the specific skin chemistry of the owner of the room, as that was the cheapest and easiest way to key IDs into those forcefields. It first registered Kamala as "human," and, had there been other humans on the flight in other rooms and therefore a necessity to distinguish, it would have then had to analyze longer and come up with "human who sweats at a rate of about 0.845 ounces an hour" - a perfectly average rate for humans, if you were wondering - "with an unusually low amount of sodium ions and high chromium content," which would then become Kamala's identity inasmuch as the door was concerned.

Kamala did not know any of that, obviously, but the point still stood. For the most part, she would be human first, and Kamala (or, if preferred, 0.845 ounces of sweat with 2.62 µg of chromium) second.

She learned this a different way. She learned this by knocking on a door that was not a door.

* * *

The door retracted very quickly to reveal a tall, well-built green woman. Her eyes were a startling shade of yellow, similar to the color of many plastic children's toys, and nearly impossible to find naturally on Earth. Obviously, however, the occurred naturally in other places, or this woman wouldn't have had eyes like that. Those eyes were currently narrowed.

"I'm not buying anything," the woman said, moving to turn away.

"Wait!" Kamala said. "I'm not selling anything!"

The woman stopped and squinted. She asked, "Are you sure?"

Kamala privately thought that was a very stupid question, and yet somehow the kind of question people asked all the time. "I am pretty sure."

"What do you want then?"

"Ah, I just thought it might be nice to introduce myself to the neighbors! We're in the cabin to your right, Kamran and I!" Kamala then realized she hadn't introduced herself. "Oh, I'm Kamala, by the way," she said, sticking her hand out. The green woman glanced down at it, puzzled, before looking back up at her.

"I am Keori."

"Nice to meet you!" Kamala said brightly. "Are you travelling to Ruul for business or pleasure?"

"It is my home. I don't understand the question."

"Oh, gotcha. So you were on Earth for…."

"I own a business. I was checking on the factories there."

"Oh, huh! What kind of business?"

Keori's demeanor changed. Her posture stiffened and one side of her thin lip curled downwards. "If you are looking for a job, there are far more openings for labor on Earth."

"Oh, no, I'm not actually- Well, I kind of am but not like- I swear I wasn't just talking to you because I thought you'd give me a job or something! Really, I'm just looking to make conversation!"

Keori frowned openly and turned away. The door popped back into place, a slightly bluer shade against the bright milky white of the walls. Kamala sighed.

"Well, she sucked," Kamran said from behind her. Kamala turned to see him leaning against their own open door, arms crossed.

"She seemed like she just got asked for things like that a lot," Kamala said, walking back into their own room. "She probably isn't usually like that." Despite that statement, Kamala really didn't feel up to introducing herself to the other neighbors anymore.

"Yeah," Kamran said. Kamala couldn't read the tone in his voice at all. "Hey, maybe tomorrow once we're settled in, we can see if there's anyone from the Nine Realms here. I think we're the only humans, but I bet there's some nidavellir around here, and we're pretty much, like, cousin species at this point."

"Okay," said Kamala. "I think I'd like that. Tomorrow."

"Brand new day."


End file.
